Skydeck Helps You Manage The Social Network Locked In Your Phone (500 Invites For Private Beta)
The private beta launched today. To get an invite, be one of the first 500 people to sign up here (enter “TechCrunch” in the box labeled ‘Where did you hear about Skydeck?”).
Says Devitt:
We’re trying to introduce information transparency into a market where there is none. All your call records are in your cell phone. We have figured out how to unpack that information, match it to your address book and present you with who your most important relationships are.
Once Skydeck unpacks this information you can start to do interesting things with it, like add tags to calls. Tag all you business calls on your cell phone bill, and you’ve got an expense report. You can sort by name, date, call length, or most expensive call. Skydeck lets you search your call records as easily as you can your e-mail. There is also a Firefox plug-in that keeps tabs on how many mobile minutes you have left this month.
Skydeck raised $1 million in February from angel investors. The service will be free for consumers. Devitt plans to make money by charging small businesses for premium services such as expense management. He also sees an opportunity for promoting other voice-related services such as voicemail transcription.
Devitt plans on adding many more features and services in the future, such as a reverse lookup for numbers not in your address book. The real potential for this, however, is to take that rearranged address book and import it back into your cell phone. “Alphabetical order is a stupid way to organize your address book,” says Devitt. (Unfortunately, you cannot do this yet). Devitt also wants to let people marry the social relationship map Skydeck culls from your cell phone data with your online social networks. Then you could see at a glance who your real friends are. You know, the ones you actually talk to.
Keep an eye on this one. The last startup Devitt founded was Vindigo (mobile city guides). He is a feisty entrepreneur, as you can see from this video below showing him testifying before Congress last September on the importance of open access for wireless networks: